Featured in five groups. See the section labelled History of this Image on RedBubble for the names of the groups.

This is a full 360° HDR panorama taken on seaward side of the Plassey Wreck on Inisheer (Inis Oirr in the local Irish language), the smallest of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.

This wreck, which lies on the Eastern shoreline, is one of the island’s tourist attraction. It is known as the “Plassey Wreck”.

The Plassey, was a cargo vesel, launched in 1940. It was renamed “Plassey” after being acquired by the Limerick Steamship Company in 1951.

The last living member of the crew said in a recent documentary that it sailed between Ireland and many exotic places including: Italy, Leningrad in Russia and Tunisia

On its final voyage the Plassey was sailing through Galway Bay carrying a cargo of whiskey, stained glass, and yarn. On 8th March 1960 it was caught in a severe storm and ran onto Finnis Rock, Inisheer, Aran Islands.

The crew of 11 were safely taken off with the assistance of local islanders. Years later in another storm the ship was washed off the rock and driven ashore on the island above the usual high tide line – where it has remained.

This High Dynamic Range panorama was created by combining 27 separate photographs covering every angle and with bracketed exposures. Those source images were shot in Raw mode on a Canon EOS 5D with a 16mm fisheye lens. They were shot in groups of three bracketed exposures (from -2 stops to +2 stops). They were then stitched and blended together using a program called Hugin, which in turn invoked a program called Enfuse to create the High Dynamic Range effect.

Because of the way that it was created this is a <b>very</b> high resolution image (the equivalent of about 30-megapixels). It′s capable of delivering very fine detail even when printed at massive sizes.

I just went and checked and it seems you can make one of your images a favourite on the old layout – it had just never occurred to me to try.

I like some of the things on the new-look … But some of it will mean more work re-formatting captions. I had adopted a format of repeating the Title in Headline style at the top of the caption which is now redundant, and things like having an image near the top of a caption just don’t look good in the new layout as it tends to get cut-off.